Energy-saving scheduling strategy for elevator group control system based on ant colony optimization

Elevator group control scheduling is to dispatch every elevator to serve call requests from different floors based on some certain goal. It´s a kind of typical combinatorial optimization problems. Ant colony algorithm is good at solving the discrete combinatorial optimization, its well global optimization ability and quick convergence velocity are both necessary to a scheduling algorithm. Moreover, reducing passengers´ waiting and traveling time is the main focus of current dispatching algorithms, neglecting the energy consumed by the elevator system. So it´s necessary to research on energy-saving algorithms. For the purpose of elevator group´s energy-conservation run, the objective function of energy is built, ant colony model for elevator group control system is created, its optimization mechanism is figured out, and convergence of the algorithm is studied in this paper. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the strategy.